Minimum mission success criteria met

July 12, 2016

Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the CubeSat MinXSS. Its one-year mission: to explore strange new flares, to seek out new light and new elemental populations, to boldly measure where no instrument has observed before.

Its minimum mission was to collect one month of science observations. That criteria has now been met. But we will continue collecting data until the spacecraft burns up in the atmosphere. That’s expected to happen within 6-12 months. During that time, we’ll launch MinXSS-2 into a higher altitude orbit that will last ~5 years. If we’re lucky, we’ll get some overlap time to cross-calibrate.